The Cat's Away!

When our Pastor goes out of town for vacation, he usually warns the congregation that "While the Cat's away, the mice will not play!" The good thing is that our Cat has a great substitute Cat. Dick and Doris (pictured above) retired from the ministry five years ago and they moved onto a hill next to their daughter's family who are also members of our church. We are so thankful that Dick is able to fill in for Pastor.

Yesterday was one such Sunday. Pastor is in PA hunting while Debie recovers from radiation treatments for thyroid cancer. So Dick preached.

Dick is my kind of preacher. He always has one or two profound statements that you remember and meditate on throughout the week. Preachers call these, "if you remember nothing else that I say, remember this." Well, Dick's "medititorial moment" yesterday was when he was reading from Isaiah 40:22. "It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth...." Dick brought to our attention that more than 2000 years ago, Isaiah spoke of the earth being a round planet, almost as if he had the same opportunity as our astronauts, to see the earth from a distance. No one can ever accuse the Bible of being outdated!

Last night after evening services, the youth (and my hubby who thinks he's a youth) played a great game of indoor soccer in the gym. The adults had fun fellowshipping on the sidelines.

The drama portion of the Christmas Cantata was practicing up in the sanctuary. The thrill of the holidays is in the air!

Our high temp for today will be 46 degrees, so Allen built a fire in the fireplace. Enjoy the Thanksgiving holiday. Take a moment to pray for the Native Americans from whom we took this land. Many of them will be gathering on Plymouth Rock this Thursday to mourn for what was taken from them. Our way of life that we enjoy today came at a great sacrifice to the first nations.

For any of our local friends, if you are in town on Thanksgiving Day, please feel free to stop by for dinner and/or dessert. Dinner starts at 1 pm. Since my brothers all have local inlaws, they will come at different times during the day...so there will be food available all day. Some of our friends are only coming for dessert, and that will be served whenever you get here. Lots of hot coffee and hot tea too. I will be serving traditional Southern Maryland stuffed ham, so if you've never tried it, you're in for a treat!

Many blessings ~ Kathie

Kosher Symbols

UPDATE: I have updated this post here to reflect the new laws.

It seems that once a week someone asks me to explain kosher symbols, or to explain how to eat dairyfree. So this post is going to be a really quick lesson in kosher symbols.

If you are on a dairyfree diet, please do not think that the ingredients list is all that you need to read. The law allows foods that are less than 1% of the total weight, to be undeclared on the ingredients list. Most people do not know this. Hopefully the law will one day require all foods to be listed, but until then, your best source of information is the kosher rating.

Jewish law forbids Jews from eating milk with meat, so they came up with a certification system that is used by Rabbis to let the buyer know if there is any dairy content. I will show you some examples here:

This is your typical container of Cool Whip. If you look to the bottom left, you will see the symbol for kosher:

The K stands for a particular Rabbinical Union and the D stands for dairy. Sometimes you will see the Dairy written out. Sometimes you will see DE which means dairy is used on the equipment and they can't vouch for the equipment being cleaned. An example of this is the deli. If they slice cheese and then lunchmeat on the same slicer, you are bound to get cheese on your lunchmeat. That would be disastrous for my family.

This box of grits show another example. The U in a circle is the most common kosher symbol:

I will show you one more symbol, pareve/parve. During passover time, the Dairy rating changes and some dairy is allowed. However, pareve means there is absolutely no dairy whatsoever.

I know it all sounds confusing, and it is! To learn more about Kosher ratings, or to see the list of all the kosher symbols, go here.

FYI, the two most dangerous things you can eat if you are dairy intolerant, are Nondairy Cool Whip and Nondairy creamer. Both contain a lot of casein which is a concentrated milk protein. It would be better for you to drink a glass of milk than to eat one of these two products. Why are they allowed to call it Nondairy? If you ever find out, please let me know!

Some of the products that people least think about containing dairy are: medicines, lunchmeats, gum (recaldent is the ingredient), tums (only get the white flavor, not fruit), popsicles, pepperoni (lactic acid starter is the culprit), sausage, breads, and fast food. Last year when the doctor thought Ruthie had asthma, we found that all three medications contained high doses of lactose, which is milk sugar. No wonder she was hurting!

Hope this has been a help. We're off to evening church.

Many blessings ~ Kathie

Quilt time!

Last year I made my mother this black and white, music-themed quilt using the Yellow Brick Road pattern. I had so much fun collecting the 22 different fabrics! Now I am collecting fabrics that are tool-themed. My Dad and my three brothers all own/work for Southern Maryland Homes here in the county. Here are the fabrics I have so far:

This is my favorite:

I'm not sure if this measuring tape fabric is sewing-themed or tool-themed, but I was able to buy a bolt of 20 yards for $1/yard. If nothing else, it will make a great backing!
The fabric that I would really like is this Screws and Nails fabric. I saw it on eBay for an exorbitant price and it was only a fat quarter size. I need at least a yard. With the arrival of our first Alberta Clipper this week, I am drawn to the sewing room. My sewing room is a former cellar in our basement, so it is quite chilly in there (which is delightful in the summer!). So I need to do some ironing first to warm the place up.

Today is recital day for Ruthie and Lizzie. The entire recital is ensemble music. Ruthie is going to play with three other children in a two piano/four hands piece (this picture is of them practicing in my Mom's studio): Lizzie and I are playing a duet on one piano. My Mom and her brother, Uncle Ron, are closing out the evening recital with a piano/violin duet that is 13 minutes long. Mom says she and Uncle Ron are really feeling their ages (slightly less than 70). But they don't sound it!

Have a great weekend. The leaves are blowing off the trees quickly. I'm off to hunt for a corned ham to make the traditional Southern Maryland stuffed ham for Thanksgiving.

Many blessing ~ Kathie

We had some visitors this week. I enjoy seeing the deer...as long as they stay away from my gardens. Aren't they cute? We've seen three sets of twins this year.

Today was a busy day. We were out the door at 8:30 am for Homeschool Co-op. Our cooking class made 6 pies ~ 2 apple, 2 pecan and 2 pumpkin. They turned out beautifully. The students got to try each of the three kinds of pies and we gave the other pies to the church for a funeral luncheon this afternoon.

One of the dear elderly ladies in our church, Miss Octavia, went home to be with the Lord this week. Miss Octavia had been failing in health for some time, so we are pleased that she is out of her pain and in heaven with her hubby. Mrs. Pat, her daughter, was very close to her Mom and I know she will be lonesome for her in the days to come.

Mrs. Pat asked my girls to sing "This World Is Not My Home" and "When We All Get To Heaven." They did a wonderful job. Here they are in church practicing before we left for the funeral home.
Mrs. Pat also asked the Men's Trio that hubby is in to sing "Marvelous Grace." They sang the best I have ever heard them sing, especially considering they were given one quick run-through before performing!

The Lord really blessed the service. There were wonderful pictures to see of Mrs. Pat and her family. They will be going to Arkansas this weekend to bury Mrs. Octavia.

After the 8 pm funeral, we headed south so we could pick up three sandwiches at Roy Roger's (the restaurant) since we were hungry (dinner was very light). We decided to do one of our favorite pastimes and headed to Solomon's Island. We divided the sandwiches 7 different ways and ate in the pavillion. Our weather today was very warm but it's supposed to get cold weather from Canada tomorrow. This is the pavillion:
Mike taught our children the finer points of ballroom dancing:
Maggie especially enjoyed it:
For some reason, our family has always enjoyed this pavillion. We have gone there and ended up singing. The acoustics under the dome are wonderful!

I enjoy looking at the quaint old homes and the old fashion clock.

All the children had fun on the playground:

Even the bathrooms are nice!

The Solomon's bridge was being worked on, so it took us a long time to get home. We sang every cowboy song we could think of, including all the cowboy Christmas songs. We got home at 10:48. We just finished praying and the children are getting into bed. It's 11:48.

I hope you and yours had a wonderful day too.

Many blessings ~ Kathie

Pumpkin Cake Failure

Well, Maggie tried, and she tried hard, but the pumpkin cake would not work with a dairyfree and eggfree cake.
I'm not sure if you can tell, but Maggie made the bottom bundt cake a spice cake, and the top bundt cake is a chocolate cake. With no eggs and butter in the mix, the cakes are light and therefore collapse under the weight of another cake and icing.

However, as you can see, this flop tasted great!! The chocolate cake especially was delicious. But Maggie wouldn't let us take it to church.

Fortunately we had leftover MexTex dip (aka Seven Layer Dip). So that was our dinner for tonight.
Hope you had a worshipful Sunday. We are having a quiet Sunday because Ruthie has laryngitis. The silence is deafening!

Many blessings ~ Kathie

Making Lumpia

Lumpia is a Philipino (Filipino) egg roll. We ate a lot of lumpia when Mike was stationed in San Diego. All but one of our neighbors was Filipino. We used to enjoy taking our evening walks around dinner time because the entire neighborhood smelled wonderful!

Every time I make lumpia, I always get requests for the recipe, so I'm going to post it here. When I make lumpia for my family, I make a healthier version by baking them on a cookie sheet in the oven at 400 degrees, turning once. Be sure to spray some PAM on both the cookie sheet and the lumpia. For guests, I usually go to the trouble of deep frying them.

Lumpia

3/4 lb ground pork (I use bulk sausage)
8 oz can water chestnuts, sliced
8 oz can bamboo shoots, sliced
1 tsp pepper
8 cloves garlic, minced
1 carrot shredded or minced
2 tblp soy sauce
1 pkg lumpia wrappers

Cook sausage or pork. Add remaining ingredients except wrappers. At this point, I prefer to put the entire mix into my food processor to make all the ingredients uniform size. But this is certainly not required.

Roll the lumpia. We use Orientex wrappers which I find are easier to separate from each other. You may also use egg roll wrappers, but they are thicker and take longer to cook. Your goal is to spread the filling and roll your wrappers so that you have long, thin lumpia. (There are always directions on the package that tells you how to roll them.) Tricky to do, just takes practice Another word about wrappers ~ always buy more than you need. Sometimes the wrappers stick together and you tear a bunch. My children think this is wonderful because they fry up all the torn wrappers and sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon. Yummy!

Deep fry until golden brown. Drain on paper napkins. Ruthie was in charge of the fryer today and she did a great job. It sure helped to have her frying while I rolled.

We like to use a sweet and sour sauce called Hawaiian Style Sweet and Sour Sauce by World Harbors.

So bake/fry up some lumpia and enjoy an "international" dinner!

Many blessings ~ Kathie

Camping at Solomon's

Last weekend we had three good days of light, steady rain. What a wonderful break from our severe drought. But the weatherman told us to enjoy the rain because he could not foresee any chance of rain again for 2-3 weeks. Oh my!

Since I had been wanting to organize an overnight campfire, I decided the time was now or never! So I put out the invitation to our church and several families signed up. At the last day, however, our weather turned cold and very windy, thanks to a hurricane out on the coast (Noel). Nonetheless, all of us admitted later that we weren't gonna be the ones to chicken out!

The wind wasn't bad until later on when we were crawling into our tents, but the cold bothered the wimpy adults. (We had to keep reminding our children to put on their jackets!) We had the best campsite on the whole base. The nature trails were a few feet from our spot, and the playground was within eyesight. And there were wonderful biking trails all over. The children never stopped running around and riding bikes all night. They also had fun playing flashlight tag.

The menu was very basic ~ roasted hot dogs and marshmallows, and plenty of hot water for tea. (...and well, hot water for Dick who drinks a cup of hot water every evening!). Below is a picture of John Patrick. My children have always felt sorry for JP because he is an only child (how does he play capture the flag?!). Tonight they found another good reason to pity him...tonight was his first ever hot dog roast...and JP is a freshman in college!
Charmaine made this delicious BBQ dish. Doesn't it look wonderful? It's ground beef and beans with BBQ sauce, covered with refrigerator rolls. I can't wait to make a dairy-free version.

John Patrick was really good about keeping all the children entertained, but he eventually brought in Sarah and Zachary to help. I don't know what Sarah is saying to Maggie in this picture, one can only imagine the drama:-)
The next morning it was very windy and cold, so we headed over to Doris and Dick's camper (76 degrees inside!) to visit. We just happened to have styrofoam cups with envelopes of grits and oatmeal, so Doris was great about pouring hot water for us:-) We had a lot of fun visiting with them.
We had so much fun that we've decided we must do it again. We'd like to do it on the church property or at our home. Thanks to everyone who came. Sure have a lot of memories added to our memory banks.

Maggie and I are getting ready to start a big cooking day for fellowship dinner at church tomorrow. She will be making a huge pumpkin cake (pictures to come) and I will make lumpia. The theme of the dinner is international since we will be having missionaries.

Have a great weekend ~ Kathie